Microsoft Surface for the hospitality industry

This is the fourth installment in a series of blogs where I have been touching
upon applications of Microsoft Surface across industry verticals like banking,
automobile and retail stores. Here let's take a look at how
Surface has been creating an impact in the hospitality industry - essentially hotels
and food/beverage establishments.

Having looked at hotels, let's see some other hospitality industry
examples. A striking example of an integrated digital experience based on
Microsoft technologies is Red MR, a chain of karaoke bars in Hong
Kong. They have gone all out in providing the very best of the
digital world to their customers by providing a combination of Microsoft
Surface, Kinect, Phone and cloud computing. Using the Surface application
customers can order food and drinks, select songs and play games. The video
is quite interesting. Similarly, Hard Rock has installed Surface at several of its outlets and uses it
to showcase the thousands of music memorabilia to enhance customer experience. See
the video here.
The iBar at Rio all-suite Hotel & Casino at Las Vegas has leveraged Surface to provide
games, shows and local information (http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/casestudiesrioibar.aspx).
Here is the video.

With these examples, we see that Microsoft Surface is indeed a significant
differentiator for hotels and food/beverage establishments, while providing
better customer experience. With the new 2.0 version of Surface, we can expect
increased interest and adoption in the days to come.